winter

snow day
Originally uploaded by wck

Here's our little wren house, hanging out in the snow.

Same house in October:

yes we can!

yes we can!
Originally uploaded by wck

inspired by this fantastic obama pie, we're having obama victory cherry pie for dessert tonight

brrrrr

more sage
Originally uploaded by wck

Some sage growing on the hill. We have about 4 sage plants on the hill, they stay alive through the fall pretty well. I use them for stuffing and other dishes for Thanksgiving.

indoor garden

declan
Originally uploaded by wck

the lavender, bay tree and cilantro are inside the kitchen sliding glass door now that it's freezing at night. declan's favorite morning sleeping spot is now right next to them... i suppose he likes to smell the lavender and bay leaves as he dreams.

pears

pears, originally uploaded by wck.

Over at a way to garden today, there's a post about small pears. I thought they looked just like the ones on the edge of one of the gardens. This is the same tree that has all the wren houses in it.

The pears are very very tiny and rather hard, but they're nice to cook with if you sautee them with butter first.

squash

squash, originally uploaded by wck.

more squash blossoms! also from my grandparents farm.

squash blossoms

squash blossoms, originally uploaded by wck.

Blossoms on a squash vine at my grandparents farms. I filled a big canvas bag with tomatoes, beets, rhubarb (still going strong!!) and carrots. We looked at the quince tree as well, but most had been eaten by something.

My grandpa was out looking for a woodchuck that had eaten most of the butternut squash. That woodchuck has good taste, the butternuts were very tasty this year.

harvest!

harvest!, originally uploaded by wck.

Picked from the deck garden - 1 siamese twin carrot, 4 eggplants, 3 tomatoes. Actually, there were 4 tomatoes, but I ate one.

eggplant!

eggplant, originally uploaded by wck.

This is my eggplant- I thought a photo had been posted before, but apparently not. It was super tasty and just the right size for a small tart.

Eggplant, tomato and goat cheese

Finally I ate my first eggplant that I grew out on the deck for dinner last night! I made the "eggplant goat cheese tart" from Williams Sonoma's recipe section. The only change was that I used frozen puff pastry for the dough, which worked ok anyway. WOW, this was delicious! It had a fantastic rich flavor- how could you go wrong with eggplant and tomato and goat cheese AND pine nuts?

And for dessert, yet another apricot and berry cornmeal crust tart. My favorite summer dessert, still.

green beans and green tomatos

Last night we had fresh greenbeans, from grandma's garden. Delicious just cut in half and steamed. We also had to pull out one of the tomato plants since it had gotten something. My guess is a fungus of some type, but I'm not sure. We took off the green tomatoes, so I sliced and breaded two small ones for fried tomatoes.

From some research, it seems that it might be "primordia". Which makes sense, I think the plants are too close to each other.

Tomato stem primordia may develop all along any tomato stem regardless of its proximity to the ground. Often it is a response to high humidity levels in the air or to excessive watering/rain around the roots. The plant attempts to compensate for the excess moisture around its soil roots by developing more roots. But the root initials themselves are not harmful to the plant. They are normal.
If you have a section of the garden that is showing a greater number of primordia and is also having wilt problems then it is likely that it is too wet there for some reason - poor drainage, too much watering or rain, etc. Diseases are more likely to develop there too.

tomato pest forum

lazy

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Oh good lord.

-NYT: A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

On a related note, I'm at my best friend's house in Seattle. It's a new house to them, and the previous owner had planted a nice little backyard garden. We were out there the other night and I pointed out all the lavender, chives, rosemary and thyme that they had growing. It gets a bit of afternoon sun, so the herbs are growing well.

Hazelnut Geranium Cake

We grow 4 kinds of scented geraniums on the deck, and the hazelnut one is really my favorite. I picked a handful of leaves this afternoon and made up the Scented Geranium cake with them. I substituted almond extract for vanilla extract just because I thought it might go better with the flavor from the leaves.

The recipie is a few years old, from Garden Plate. Their website still has the article about cooking with scented geraniums and the recipe for the scented geranium cake.

Nettles Pesto and more Rhubarb

We had Nettles pesto (just steam the leaves, then make up pesto as usual with them instead of basil leaves) for dinner. Pretty tasty. And another rhubarb dessert, with rhubarb and strawberries from grandma's.

Strawberry Rhubarb Puff from cooks.com, but the fruit was cooked in a compote first. At the very end I added cinnamon to the fruit. The crust should also have a pinch of cardamon and ginger added to it- gives it a much nicer flavor.

More NYT on whether you should eat local

Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores? from one of the authors of Freakonomics

Salad with nectarines

We had our first CSA pickup today, which included a bunch of salad greens. Most of them got turned into a salad of greens- lettuce, pea tips, chicory- and sliced nectarine. Yum. I think It actually balances out bitter greens in a salad better than tomato.

So we still have a bunch of chicory to cook with this week. I'm thinking of braising some of it tomorrow.

A Farmers’ Market on the Edge of the Pacific

NYT again, on a California farmer market. With a great pluot recipe!

A Farmers’ Market on the Edge of the Pacific

- http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/a-farmers-market-on-the-edge-of-the-pacific/

Rhubarb for Dessert

The rhubarb that I picked Wednesday night became dessert tonight. Super simple, but this way can come out very tart if you don't add strawberries!

Rhubarb Compote

1. Chop up rhubarb stalks (toss out the leaves, they're not edible)
2. Put the rhubarb into a pot on the stove and add about a cup of sugar. I like to add about 2 TB of water as well to start things off
3. cook, stirring often, at medium high for about 20 minutes
4. it's done when it looks like an applesauce. Now you can put it into a pie or on a tart shell

We ate ours on a cornmeal tart shell: Martha Stewart apricot & berry tart recipe. I've had that recipe since 1999, and I make the tart shell several times a week all summer. It's a very quick, very easy, very foolproof tart shell that tastes delicious. I leave out the sugar as it will taste the same without it if you have good cornmeal and a fruit filling.

The cornmeal came from the Cooper Grist Mill in Chester.

Why Bother?

A NYT article from Michael Pollan this spring :

There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

- By MICHAEL POLLAN Published: April 20, 2008

rhubarb and bok choy

rhubarb, originally uploaded by wck.

Dinner last night was Bok Choy from the Union Square greenmarket.

* slice some bok choy into small bits
* heat some sesame oil in a nonstick pan. add minced garlic
* toss in bok choy
* add about 1/2 cup chicken stock
* add chile paste (I use one from whole foods that is marked as a "curry base" so it has some spices added)
* cook on medium heat, stirring often, for about 6 minutes.

Lettuce, lavender, rosemary

Lettuce, lavender, rosemary, originally uploaded by wck.

Our deck garden hanging out in the kitchen on a chilly morning

Pike Place Market

Declan and I used to walk through here almost every day in the spring/summer/fall on our way home from work.

eating locally

Welcome to my new little blog. I'm starting this one separately from my personal rambling-about-everything blog for a couple reasons, mostly just to keep everything organized. So this is my area to post about one my biggest passions- eating organically and locally. I'm finally getting around to writing about it because we had our CSA kickoff meeting last night with Len from Upper Meadows Farm. (yes, I grow some of my own veggies and we get some from my grandparents farm, but it's not enough to feed me, my parents, my sister, my brother in law, and three kids all summer.) Len talked a bit about how it can be challenging to get veggies in your CSA basket that you've never eaten before, and have no idea how to cook them. I've certainly lived through that (I used to do the Pike Place Market CSA in Seattle), so I thought I'd blog as much as I can about what I'm eating from the CSA, our own veggies, and things I buy at farmer markets around here.

My grandma and my mom are the ones who turned me into an organic, local food nut. My great grandfather bought a farm in New Hampshire in the 1930s or so, and my grandma bought a farm in Mine Hill NJ when she got married in the 1940s. My mom grew up there, and I basically grew up there- we lived (and still live) only a few minutes away. I learned how to drive out by the apple trees, picked blueberries all summer, and was generally spoiled like crazy with fresh veggies and fruit growing up.

Since this is blog about actually eating locally farmed foods, here is one of my favorite snack recipes

1. Cut some small tomatoes in half
   
2. pour a little olive oil on top of them. sprinkle with pepper and salt. you can also put on some basil or oregano
   
3. put them onto a little baking pan, pour a smidge of olive oil around them in the pan so that the skins get a bit on them
   
4. roast in an oven at 300 for about 20 minutes
   
5. take them out, crumble goat cheese on top. be careful, they will be really hot. you probably want to put goat cheese on when they first come out of the oven, and give them a minute so the cheese will melt and the tomato can cool a little.